Weaned On Conspiracy: A Dialogue Between Chris Wilder And Mike Kelley

This discussion was recorded on 27 January 1998 and first published, in a substantially different version, in Be Magazine, No. 5 [Science and Surfaces] (Berlin: Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, May 1998), pp. 41-53. Chris Wilder is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work addressing the aesthetics of surfer, techno, and UFO fanatic subcultures has been exhibited internationally. The two artists met at the California Institute of the Arts in the mid-1980s, where Wilder was pursuing graduate studies and Kelley was an instructor. Because of their common interest in Ufology, Wilder approached Kelley to participate in this discussion, commissioned by Be Magazine. The conversation was designed primarily to address Wilders archive of UFO photographs, acquired from the United States government, and his artists book Project Blue Book (1995), a reprint of the government agencys report of the same title, issued in 1966, and related artworks by Wilder, including his solo exhibition, Chill Out at the Roger Merians gallery in New York in 1995.

Mike Kelley: You mentioned Frank Edwards. (1) When I was a boy I was really into his books, which are compilations of all sorts of inexplicable phenomena. He had obviously been influenced by Charles Fort. (2) I hadnt heard of Fort at that time, but Edwards books, which generally included UFO stories, were available at the corner drug store. I was never a science fiction fan, nor much interested in the technological aspects of Ufology, but I was interested in stories about alien visitationsespecially those in which the aliens werent humanoid. I was extremely taken with one of Edwards stories. It was about a purple glob that falls out of the sky; and when the police come, it disintegrates leaving no trace. (3) I havent read the story since, but recently I found the book its in, and discovered I had mixed it up in my memory with different storiesones that were more conspiratorial, in which police take away samples of materials that fall out of UFOs and lose them. The conspiratorial aspects of such stories interested me.

Chris Wilder: Thats where my interest in Ufology comes from. My father was a skeptic. He was always feeding me conspiracy theorytalking about the Lincoln murder conspiracies. (4) It started with Richard Nixon, who he was dead set against, and evolved into a general distrust of the government. Nixons Watergate cover-ups intensified his beliefs. Recently, my father told me that every 11,400 years the Earths poles reverse, which may be the result of alien visitation. This event would explain the sinking of Atlantis. We are now nearing the next 11,400 year point, so were due for a pole shift. I became interested in conspiracy theories because of my father. There was a compilation of UFO photographs in the small annex library in the town where I grew up. I would go and look through it every day. Its focus was on the inexplicable nature of UFOsthe question of if they were real, or not. You created your own conspiracy out of blending different UFO stories together and, in a way, I think the photos that document Unidentified Flying Objects compiled by Project Blue Book produce that effect. (5) They imply weird narratives. These photographs come off as constructions, but one doesnt know who made them. MK: Project Blue Book is part of a history of the compilation of inexplicable occurrences that our culture is enamored with: ghost stories, tales of life after death, angelic visitations. Primarily, these are oral histories of creepy events. The investigation of UFO phenomena is different, in that it is presented as science. Ufology became such a dominant cultural mythology that the government felt it needed to step-in to lessen peoples fears. That is what led to all those conspiracy theories about government cover-ups around UFO information. When I was a teenager, and engaged with radical politics, I found accounts of government cover-ups extremely attractive. Later, I became more interested in the aesthetics of Ufologywhy its visual elements look the way they do. Going through the photos from Project Blue Book, its obvious to me that many are faked; there is not even an attempt to make them look real. Yet all of the photos are presented equally, as if they carry the same amount of documentary weight. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Books consultant in astronomy, admits that the agency was basically a shamthe Pentagon would determine causes for

UFO sightings without even asking for his professional opinion. (6) Project Blue Books uniform treatment of all UFO sightings discredited Ufology as a science, which was, probably, the agencys purpose. Project Blue Book was an enormous collection agency of useless informationa giant dead letter box.

CW: The photographs are all the same: an endless roll of images that carry no weight one way or another. After compiling thousands of pages of information in Project Blue Book, the Air Force concluded that UFOs dont exist. The Projects aim had been to describe the unexplainable, and it ended up producing nothing, which was the real point. MK: It seems that little attempt has been made actually to contact the people who sent their photos to Project Blue Book. It would be interesting to establish a history for them focusing on how they are constructed images, but one cant get access to their authors. CW: I have the reel of microfilm that contains all the pictures, but the people who took them are not named. (7) Its as if they dont exist; the paper trail is cut off at that point. MK: Severed from any historical footing, the UFO photos become pure imagebut, if the photos are constructed, are art, no information is available about what the artists intentions were. Of course, the motivation behind these images was not to make art, but to present evidence. CW: Its like early Conceptual Art, which didnt focus on the artists personal touchthe mark of art. The photos in much Conceptual Art are simply documentationa picture of someone digging a hole, for example. In Project Blue Book you might find a photo of a pen, a pack of Salems and a quarter, and a dent in the ground: it looks like Conceptual art, like

Doug Hueblers work. (8) Because the Conceptual artists adopted the look of the snapshot, I cant look at snapshots without referring them to Conceptual Art, which caused me to look at the photos in Project Blue Book in a very different way. Thats, initially, why I started printing pictures taken from Project Blue Book. I wanted to pose the question: what is art? The photos from Project Blue Book became my art, because they are anonymous. When Sherrie Levine appropriates an image by Walker Evans, the question is always: whos picture is it? (9) But, in this case it doesnt really matter who took itits all about the image. I decided I just liked UFO photographswhether they relate to Conceptual Art, or are faked or not, isnt important. To stress this preexisting quality, I made my own photographs look like prints, not like real photographsthey could have been torn out of a book, they look like found images.

MK: I think youre right. It is, precisely, because of Conceptualism, that UFO photographs are now seen to resemble art. An art form that was somewhat anti-visual, Conceptualism adopted the snapshot photograph because it didnt have aesthetic valueand because snapshots have the look of truth. But because of their use in Conceptual Art, the random quality of amateur photos became a recognizable aesthetic trope. What Conceptualism did was make artists very conscious of the formal qualities of the snapshot. As an aside, I think in the future, once snapshot technology is replaced, snapshots will appear as aestheticized as we now consider the frozen poses of nineteenth century photography. That look was simply a byproduct of having to sit still for long exposures. Because of that, we now tend to think of people in the nineteenth century as moving in a wooden manner, which is often how they are portrayed in contemporary period films. The average person looking at a snapshot now doesnt notice that a head is cut off in the frame, for example. Essentially, a snapshot is a keepsake of a memorable eventa birthday, wedding, or family trip. They are not really considered as images; their purpose is to stir recollection. Conceptualist practice really made me aware of the pictorial

tropes of the snapshot. Before that, I just looked right through them to the social ritual presented, oblivious to their status as compositions. Snapshots are not pictures, and are not meant to be considered pictorially. In order to understandas an artistwhat made them look natural, I had to examine them formally; I had to recognize the compositional tropes that made a photograph look like a snapshot. Jim Shaw made some fake UFO photographs in the late 1970s. (10) They are very bland, clumsily composed images of someone standing in a landscape, pointing at light in the sky. They capture the aesthetics of the UFO photograph perfectly.

CW: At one point I wanted to make fake UFO photos, but I figured there were so many real ones out there I didnt need to. Theres already enough crap in the world. I think its the first place you start, if youre going to make art about UFOs, you make fake documentary photos. In Project Blue Book, a lot of times the pictures are landscapes where reported UFO sightings took place. Its as if you are supposed to imagine the sighting. The photograph documents the place where the big event happened, but now its just blank terrain. They look like Robert Smithsons photographs. (11) Its the same with a UFO crash site: it looks like any other part of the desert. MK: That reminds me of police photography, specifically the feelings induced by photos of murder scenes after the bodys been removed. Because of its association with death, the mundane scene is loaded with heavy energy. And the uncanny effect is heightened when the evacuated scene is especially normal. UFO photographs are very much like that. They don't look real unless the locale is bland. UFO photos set in visually extravagant places dont look natural. For example, Ive seen a UFO photo set in Bryce Canyon National Park; its a place thats simply too weird-looking for me to accept that something unusual could happen there. Such a proposition stretches the limits of plausibility. CW:

A UFO sighting is a very specific event, and in that sense it strikes me as analogous to a sculptural presentationit is not a natural event. Its strange that Area 51 (12) has become a place where tourists go to watch for UFOs. If you wait long enough, youll see one. It is an automatic experience rather than a special occasiona chance event. You just go out to the UFO field and share the experience with the great many; its like going to an art gallery. Once I was driving in Mexico and there was an old brick house in the middle of the desertand there was a tree in the yard painted bright purple. Tires were hanging from the branches. I thought, What is this? Is this a sculpture? Was the person who made it just bored, or did they have a point to convey? I think the photographs in Project Blue Book provoke similar questionsthey could be hoaxes; they could just be about wasting time. MK: I believe there are different kinds of faked UFO photographs. For the true believer, faking a UFO photograph is a testament to their faith. The image reflects their experience, their reality. But then other people fake them to amuse themselves. Those people are more like artists, in my estimation. CW: If someone fakes UFO documentation, its certainly not for money or fame. It causes one to wonder what the impetus is behind their action. MK: I think Dave Chorley and Doug Bower, who made the fake crop circles in England, are good artists. (13) Faking UFO crop circles posed a challenge, and as they developed their practice, their pictograms became more complex. They followed how their work was interpreted in the press, then responded shortened. For them, maybe, it was just about having fun; but they treated it very seriously. It was far more than simple vandalism. CW: They must have sat down at one point and made drawings for them.

MK: It would seem so. The patterns get quite complicated. In a way, I prefer their work to Michael Heizers. (14) Its more a response to contemporary mythology; it strikes me as less primitivistic. CW: It interests me that most UFO crashes take place in deserts, where Earth Art is also produced. The UFO wedged into the dirt could be seen as a Michael Heizer. (15) MK: The way you present UFO imagery, Chris, is often very gritty, foregrounding a strong physical presence. In the exhibition in which you presented the microfilm machine containing all of the photos from Project Blue Book you also showed a clunky, vortex-like construction. (16) In its use of poor materials, it reminds me of the tree construction you described seeing in the Mexican desert. CW: That was called The Web of Deception; it is made out of pipe cleaners. MK: That sculptures strong presence seemed to hinge on the fact that the materials were so simple, so unslick. You would think that things with really slick production values would be more present than things without them. But the opposite is the casevery slick things fall into a fantasy mental spaceare otherworldly. CW: Well, I started out with the idea to make something slick, but the more I worked, the more I was repulsed by slickness. So much work, now, is produced by people who only care about slicknessthe look of professionalism. I think of myself as being like an amateur scientist, who puts things together any way he can. I want my work to be really obvious, like the phoniness of the UFO photos in Project Blue Book.

MK: I could see this direct approach as a strategy to make something more present sculpturally, which was the point I made before. But I could also see it as pointing towards the folksythe hand madewhich is, of course, something one sees a lot in the folk art side of Ufology. There are people who have built spaceships in their basement out of materials essentially scavenged from the dump. Obviously, this approach to construction is not some modernist attempt to foreground sculptural materiality. Material issues are not really a consideration in such an object; the idea behind the work transcends its material nature. Folk Art is like Conceptual Art in that regard. CW: I believe the people building UFOs in their basements want them to look slick. They want to make things beyond the human; theyre not satisfied with the crudeness of life on Earth. Sometimes I feel like that; I want to leave the Earth, and the constructions that I make are a way of removing myself, of not being a part of the Planet Earth. MK: The prints you made from the Project Blue Book photographs are not exactly crude or folksythey are all well made, but still have a clunky quality. They are obviously photographic, but because they have been printed in off colors on heavy watercolor paper, the pictorial quality of the photograph is lessened and they almost look like simple marks on paper. CW: The image lies directly on top of the paper and gives no illusion of space. MK: In your chill-out room installation, you made the walls of the gallery reflective by applying aluminum foil to them. This seemed to be an invitation for the viewer to fall into the mirrored space. You also made paintings out of aluminum foil, but the surface is more crumpled. (17)

CK: My aluminum foil paintings started with the image of the foil hats that UFO nuts wear to keep aliens from reading their minds. The next step was to make an arbitrary map, using the material, of a UFO crash site. Then it became completely abstract; the tinfoil painting is really about nothing. MK: Are the crinkles in the tinfoil meant to be read like tea leaves, is my relationship to the painting a projective experience? CW: Like tea leaves, or a topographic mapbut a topographic map that has no referent. MK: The chill out room installation that was papered with foil mimicked the kind of places set up in discos to relax in and zone out to a techno soundtrack. But this seductive effect was contradicted by the fact that the installation space was just too fucked up to really relax in: the reading material was dog-earedthere was too much physical wear and tear in the environment to allow one to get swallowed up in the space. It strikes me that, in a lot of your work, you gesture toward seduction, but then nip it in the bud. CW: I didnt want people to be able to relax in the Chill Out room. It isnt a comfortable placethe lights in the space are hideous colors. It looks like a place where youre supposed to lie down on the floor and dig the vibes, but you cant. You are forced to think about where you are. In contrast, a real chill out room is where you dont think about anything. In my Chill Out room, I put books about critical theory next to books about UFO theory. You are forced to question if critical theory is any different than any other kind of theory. I dont see much difference between themits all speculation. A lot of artists now use critical theory as handbooks for the production of art. MK: I think the point you are making by putting critical theory next to crackpot theory is

that, in the art world, all theory is crackpot. The art context makes one question the truth value of anything put into it. CW: Exactly! To the lay person, critical theory and Ufology are equally bullshit. Theyre both misunderstood; the complexity of such texts becomes the great leveler. I was presenting them as the same thing. MK: I dont know if this interests you, but Im interested in how Ufology embraces both the abject and the metaphysical. As in the purple blob story, there are many accounts of organic materials falling out of the sky: gooey stuff, like angel hair, and gelatinous meteors. And theres a lot of goo in alien abduction scenarios. UFO photographs often depict amorphous shapes that seem to be either blobs of light or gaseous cloudsaerial phenomena that are formless, but have no abject undertones. So, UFO mythology accommodates heavenly imagery whether it is abject, resembling body waste, or relates to more traditional transcendental imagerysuch as halos of light, or cloudy forms. CW: Do you think of Spiritualism ectoplasm? MK: Exactly. When I was a student at Cal Arts, I became interested in early twentieth century Spiritualist photography, because I thought it represented a photographic history that related to Conceptualism. Ghost photographs are obviously faked; they are photographs designed to prove something, and fail to do so. Similarly, Conceptual photography often has a pseudo-scientific or pseudo-anthropological look to it, and often seems to be striving to picture something thats either dematerialized or overtly constructed. UFO photographs have the same qualities, but because the social belief systems attached to them are so strong, it is often difficult for people to see them as constructed images, to understand them as a kind of art. Thats changing now because Ufology is starting to emerge from the realm of the crackpot into general popular culture. Its pictorial tropes, so

recognizable from films and TV, can now be understood as standardized images. CW: Its also interesting that Spiritualism came to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century and were now at the end of the twentieth. Theres an interest in whats beyond us; people are looking for something outside of themselves. The New Age aspect of Ufology doesnt interest me. Im interested in the UFO as a literal, sculptural objectbut one that isnt present. Didnt you get interested again in Ufology through abduction stories? MK: Yes, through my interest in Repressed Memory Syndrome. It was the alien abduction scenarios that got me interested. What I thought was interesting about the aesthetics of Ufology was the conflation of the technical and the bodily. In the art world these have often been presented as opposite concerns. For example, the Surrealist and Expressionist traditions have produced manyoften abjectrepresentations of the bodywhile in the Bauhaus tradition there is frequently a focus on technological concerns, accompanied by utopian sentiments. I was never interested in the so-called Space Brother movement of the 1950s, in which the typical image of the alien is an angelic being who, in his technically advanced craft, arrives on Earth to benefit mankind. (18) Such a mythos is just too modernist for me. In more recent accounts of alien contact, the aliens perform anal probes and dump people in pools of goocompletely horrible and abusive acts are performed in their spaceshipsyet the descriptions of these vehicles has not changed at all! Youd think the notion of alien morals would change instep with the aesthetics of the technology associated with them. Yet, the flying saucera sleek, modernist machinic idealremains the norm. But the orderly exterior now hides a corrupt interior. This relationship strikes me as analogous to the socialized exterior of the serial murderer. Such criminals must necessarily look normal in order to fit in and to remain unsuspected as they continue their killing sprees.

CW: The craft is a minimalist sculpture with a gooey inside. MK: Its an analog for the bodya clean exterior and a wet interior. Im interested in the theory that everything that people see in relation to alien contact has nothing to do with aliens at all, that its all a screen memory for something we cannot even comprehend. CW: Jacque Vallee suggests that these beings arent traveling here from elsewhere, they are already here, and have been involved with Earth beings for Lord knows how long. (19) MK: These beings, or whatever they are, only allow you to see whatever clichs we are already pre-programmed to see. We are incapable of seeing them. Perhaps it is wrong to think of aliens as beings at allperhaps what we are talking about here is closer to what has been called the unconscious. Its something that cannot be accessed; one can only retrieve archetypes, aspects of a collective unconscious that find their way into our perception as social clichs. Thats why UFO stories are always the same: the gray alien is always a childlike figure, a UFO is always a flying saucer. Such regularity of form is reminiscent of the standardized motifs in folk art. The images of aliens, and their spacecrafts, are as undifferentiated as the handmade sock monkey dolls found throughout the United States. CW: Every description of an alien at this time conforms to the model of the typical gray, with whom conspiratorial types say the government has signed a treaty. This may be true in North America, but have you noticed that South Americans tend to describe aliens as short little hairy creatures? Ive read about five or six incidents from Bolivia and Argentina like this. MK: They sound like the aliens described in Mexicothe Chupacabras (goat suckers).

In books on Ufology from the 1960s, theres a lot more variety of descriptions of alien body types: stinking giants, little insect-like men with giant ears ... CW: The Moth Man Propheciesdid you ever read that? (20) The being is described as headless, with glowing red eyes and bat-like wings. Then there are the 50s space Brother angelic Aryan types. There is the famous encounter in Brazil, in which a man was abducted by, and had sex with, a female alien with blonde hair and slanted eyes, who growled like a dog. (21) MK: ...or Truman Bethurums meeting with a beautiful female alien. (22) Such encounters in the 1950s led to numerous comedic films featuring space babes. CW: The descriptions have become so uniform. MK: If you said you saw a little hairy man or a blonde, space babe now, everyone would laugh at you. Its sad. It only took fifty years for the mythologies of Ufology to become fixed and stale.

Notes: 1. Frank Edwards began his career as a radio announcer in 1923, going on to become a political commentator for the Mutual radio network, as well as a popular newspaper columnist. His books include: Stranger than Science (1959); Strange Fate (1963); Strange World (1964); Flying SaucersSerious Business (1966); and Flying SaucersHere and Now (1967).

2. Charles Fort (1874-1932) worked full time for 27 years at the British Museum and New York Public Library, researching scientific journals, old periodicals, newspapers and manuscript accounts to gather material on inexplicable phenomena. See, Charles Fort, The Complete Books of Charles Fort (New York: Dover, 1974); and Damon Knight, Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), Forts biography. 3. Frank Edwards, Police and the Purple Glob in Strange World (New York: Ace Books, 1964), pp. 212-213. 4. See, William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983). 5. In 1947, the United States Air Force formed Project Sign to investigate reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs); in 1948 the title was changed to Project Grudge; and in 1952 to Project Blue Book. The agency collected and examined thousands of oral descriptions, drawings and photographs related to UFO sightings. The project was terminated in 1969 when the Air Force transferred the responsibility of UFO research to the University of Colorado. For a history of these projects see, Brad Steiger, ed., Project Blue Book (New York, Ballantine Books, 1976). Chris Wilders book, Project Blue Book1 October 1995 (Gent: Imschoot, uitgevers, 1995) is a reprint of Project Blue Book1 February 1966, an investigation by the US government concerning UFO phenomena. 6. Steiger, Project Blue Book, p. 17. 7. Under the Freedom of Information Act (enacted in 1974 to force the release of secret government documents to the public), Wilder acquired microfilm copies of the UFO-related photographs collected by Project Blue Book. 8. On Douglas Huebler, see Kelleys essay, shall we Kill Daddy? in Mike Kelley, Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism, ed., John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 9. On Sherrie Levine and the appropriation of photographs by Walker Evans and others, see Howard Singerman, Seeing Sherrie Levine" October (Summer 1994); and Global Nets: Appropriation and Postmodernity, the introduction to John C. Welchman, Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (G +B Arts

International/Routledge, 2001). 10. The three-part photograph, UFO Polaroid (1978), is reproduced in the catalogue for Jim Shaws retrospective, Jim Shaw: Everything Must Go (Geneva: Muse dArt Moderne et Contemporaine, 2000), p. 25. 11. See Robert A. Sobieszek, Robert Smithson: Photo Works (Alberquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). 12. Area 51, also known as Groom Lake or Dreamland, is a secured secret military base, covering 3,000,000 acres, located within the Nellis Bombing and Gunnery Range, 90 miles north of Las Vegas, Nevada. The test range has long been associated with UFO activity. Tourists from all over America gather at certain sites in proximity to Area 51 to watch for UFOs, and it is rumored that alien spacecraft, and even living aliens, are held at the base. 13. The crop circle phenomenon, and Chorley and Bowers activities, are described in Jim Schnabel, Round in Circles: Poltergeists, Pranksters, and the Secret History of Cropwatchers (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994). 14. See Mark C. Taylors essay in Michael Heizer: Double Negative (Los Angeles and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art and Rizzoli, 1991). 15. Illustrations picturing a flying saucer crashed in the desert most often make reference to the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash in July 1947. One such drawing graces the cover of IUR (International UFO Reporter) magazine, November/December 1993 (vol. 18, no. 6), accompanied by the headline: the Search for the Roswell Archeologists. The Roswell case, in which news reports of a downed UFO were later denied by the government, led to allegations by UFO conspiracy theorists of a government cover-up. 16. In his one-person exhibition, Project Blue Book, at Blum and Poe gallery, Santa Monica, October 1994, Wilder exhibited a microfilm machine that allowed gallery-goers to print out copies of whatever Project Bluebook UFO photo they fancied. 17. Chill Out was a one-person exhibition by Chris Wilder at the Roger Merians Gallery in New York in 1995.

18. On the Space Brother movement, see the documentary film, Farewell Good Brothers (dir. Robert Stone, 1992). 19. On Jacques Vallee, see note 14 to The Aesthetics of Ufology, in this volume. 20. John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies was first published in 1975; a film version of the book, directed by Mark Pellington, and a new paper edition from Tor Books, were released/published in 2002. 21. The reference here is to the famous case of Antonio Villas Boas, who claimed to have been abducted from rural Brazil in October 1957; see Terry Melanson, Antonio Villas Boas: Abduction Episode Ground Zero (http://www. geocities.com/mevlevi2000/boas-abduction.htm). 22. See Truman Bethurum, Aboard A Flying Saucer (Los Angeles: DeVorss, 1954).